Hey, so I used to be an avid player of TS2 however I stopped playing quite a few years ago now. I've recently decided to re-install my game and I have the Base game, University, Seasons, and Apartment Life installed. Now, from my past experience playing the game I seem to recall people suggesting that it wasn't a good idea to install EPs out of sync with their release order. Is my memory correct? Will it cause me issues to install the likes of Nightlife, Bon Voyage, Pets, Free Time etc despite having later EPs installed?

Thank you!

installation order I take would not cause any problem.

it might be good to install each respective patch right after installing each pack.

I always used to install in order, but that's because I came to the game from Sims 1, which really didn't like it if you installed out of sequence. Sims 2 handles it a lot more gracefully, so should be fine.

As you already have AL installed you won't even need to update your mods.

No, that's fine. Just make sure to patch after each one.

Doesn't Windows 8 throw a wobbly if things are installed in the wrong order, though? There's a thread in the Help section that says it does; I took no chances and followed the order listed there. Windows 7 was definitely okay with any order; I don't know about 10 because I don't have it.

This is good to know if I ever decide to install BV.

It's best to install in order (because there's patches on the CDs that fix the older versions - though I'm not sure if these are the same patches you can download), but technically you should be okay installing them out of order.

If you can, install in order. If you can't or won't, try installing out of order - and if things get messed up, you can always reinstall (or perhaps even get the UC so you get all the packs in one go). You may want to install the extra EPs in order, though.

I've always installed in order, and so far I haven't had any problems related to the game getting messed up from installing. I have had a few issues with the save files getting a bit scrambled/unusable when adding a new EP, but that's so long ago now I can barely remember what happened. It's possible the bugs I remember were related to outdated CC.

That was TS1 that had to be installed in order. TS2 is designed to be installed out of order if necessary.

I'm running windows 10 and decided to throw caution to the wind and install Nightlife and Bon Voyage out of order. So far I have not experienced any issues. Hopefully if you move to a win10 system this will serve as a useful anecdote for you.

Thanks everybody for responding, really appreciate it. Thus far everything is running fine, fingers crossed.